Soul Calling BOOK SAMPLE

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SOUL CALLING
“Every coming to America is an act of defiance. But as Joel Pickford tells us—shows us—in this remarkable book, no journey to America quite
matches the Hmong journey for sheer stubbornness. From the highlands of Laos they came, slash-and-burn farmers with no written language who
would not easily give up their ways. From the ‘stealing’ of young brides to the sacrificing of animals to the growing of backyard opium, the Hmong
have, indeed, perplexed us. With pen and lens, deftly tracing that headstrong journey, Pickford now shows us what is harder to see: that the Hmong,
by clinging so obstinately to their past, have given us our own past.”
—Mark Arax, author of West of the West and The King of California
“Soul Calling is a seminal and luminous work that compassionately documents the Hmong American experience in the Dorothea Lange tradition.
Pickford’s imagery is as lush as his prose, and his insights are deeply personal and thoroughly researched. I found myself fully immersed in
fascination and delight.”
—Cindy Wathen, coauthor of Remembering Cesar: The Legacy of Cesar Chavez
“Joel Pickford’s photographs eloquently capture the story of the Hmong people as they struggle to make the transition from one culture to another. His
images are moving and powerful, opening a window into a world few outsiders have ever seen. Reading Joel’s first-hand account of his journey is also
a very moving experience. Wonderful!”
—Cara Weston, photographer and coauthor of Head in the Clouds
“A spellbinding combination of photographs and text provide a fascinating account of Hmong life in Laos, the long and difficult journey to America,
and the challenging resettlement of a group of recent refugees. Pickford’s ability with both words and images is inspiring.”
—Elizabeth Partridge, author of Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange
“‘Fleeing the tiger to meet the lion,’ the Hmong have become our neighbors. Joel Pickford takes us on a keenly observed, compassionate, and
beautifully depicted five-year and eight-thousand-mile journey through the experiences of this diaspora people. By traveling from the new Hmong
homeland in the Central Valley of California back to their American-bombed homeland of Laos, where some Hmong still live, Pickford allows us
to see through gorgeous photos and words how so many souls might find themselves dislocated yet also called into a newly named and hopeful
future in the United States. East-West encounters bristle on every page, as the artist meets his Hmong muse, Hmong musicians heal, and Hmong
poets remember their history, much as ancient Greeks once did. This volume makes a substantial contribution not only as a work of art but also as
an original piece of remarkably well-written—sometimes heartbreaking, other times humorous—scholarship in the field of diaspora studies.”
—Honora Howell Chapman, coeditor of A Companion to Josephus in His World
“Joel Pickford’s photographer’s eye and poet’s ear are exquisite. Through stunning pictures and evocative essays he traces his personal encounters
with one of America’s most recent immigrant groups, the Hmong. Pickford recreates his experience of their world with intelligence, humor, and
fine sensitivity.”
—Lillian Faderman, author of I Begin My Life All Over: The Hmong and the American Immigrant Experience
“Joel Pickford creates as many remarkable, lucid images with his prose as he does with his lens. He has achieved something rare in documentary
photography, removing the perception of his own presence from the frame. And by so doing, he has become a compassionate and egalitarian witness
to the previously invisible life of the Hmong.”
—Christofer C. Dierdorff, portrait photographer, filmmaker, and director of The Tapestry of Life
A Photographic Journey through the Hmong Diaspora
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOEL PICKFORD
Foreword by Kao Kalia Yang
Heyday, Berkeley, California
Heyday would like to thank the James Irvine Foundation for its support of Central Valley literature.
© 2012 by Joel Pickford
Foreword © 2012 by Kao Kalia Yang
This book is dedicated with love to my three favorite children, Fentha, Bobby, and Sandy.
İņœĵĮńœĤŗĵļįŏĻœĸňģĭŀĦĺŁĵĭńŒĽŀģōijĦōĴĮīœŁįļįįńœōĸĿōĨĮĪńœ
All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Heyday.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pickford, Joel.
Soul calling : a photographic journey through the Hmong diaspora / Joel Pickford.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-59714-168-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Hmong Americans--California. 2. Hmong (Asian people)--United States. 3. Hmong (Asian people)--Laos--History--20th century.
4. Hmong (Asian people)--Thailand--History--20th century. I. Title.
F870.H55P53 2012
305.895972’073--dc22
2011011791
Cover Photo: Qeej player at the funeral for Hlaw Neng Thao Lee, Fresno, 2006. Photo by Joel Pickford.
Book Design: Lorraine Rath
Printed in China by Imago
Orders, inquiries, and correspondence should be addressed to:
Heyday
P.O. Box 9145, Berkeley, CA 94709
(510) 549-3564, Fax (510) 549-1889
www.heydaybooks.com
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You are the future of Laos and the world.
ijĹģĸňģĥņļĿĮŁĥʼnĪĤļĦİĿŌĭĪĸŁĹōĸĿĺłĸŀįŎĸģ
CONTENTS
Foreword by Kao Kalia Yang
xi
CALIFORNIA
Photographs: The New Arrivals, 2004–2006
Photographs: Hmong Americans
Narrative, Part One
1
37
109
LAOS
Photographs: Hmong Village Life in Laos
153
Narrative, Part Two
213
Yer Lor Lee: A Hmong Shaman Tells Her Story
239
References
251
Bibliography
255
Project Team Members
257
Captions
258
About the Author
264
FOREWORD
Kao Kalia Yang
It has been twenty-four years since my family’s long journey to America. For me, Laos is only alive in
the stories my elders tell me. My father speaks of the mist over the mountains, of how the bellies of
the clouds floated so low that a child could reach and touch them, floating in the mystical white fog of
morning, feet on the earth. My grandmother told stories of how a tiger had chased her through the slice
of bamboo leaves in a heavy jungle, how rivulets of Hmong blood seeped into the Laotian earth in the
wake of the things that chased us. My memories of Thailand are those of a child. I see the open sewage
canal that marked our side of the camp as the river of my youth, and the hungry dogs that prowled its
dusty perimeters as the wild stallions of Southeast Asia. It is in America that I’ve lived the bulk of my life.
Those early years are a long-ago memory. I remember my cousins living in a two-bedroom downstairs duplex along Maryland Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. Uncle Chue and Auntie had seven children
then, five girls and two boys. The bedrooms were so tiny that my cousins couldn’t all sleep in them.
Auntie and Uncle slept on old twin mattresses placed side by side, with the two youngest in their arms
at night. The three older girls shared a full-sized mattress in a room that was barely big enough for the
saggy brown square of softness they rested on. The boys had to climb through a window to sleep on the
porch. I remember how in the wintertime my boy cousins would wake up and crawl through that window
into the dim living space with icicles in their hair and stiff, frozen lashes—even as they spent nights
huddled beneath the mismatched quilts and comforters Auntie had gotten from the church basement.
Each time I saw Kong and Sue with their spiky hair all stiff with cold, I wondered if I could break their
xi
FOREWORD
frozen hair into chunks, crumble it with my small fingers and create
black snow in the palms of my hands. From the distance of adulthood
I can only marvel at the fortitude of young men and the imagination of
a young girl…how we forgot to look at the faces of our mothers and
fathers as we gazed upon one another.
Today I look at the photos by Joel Pickford and I see those faces from
long ago—the young man and the young woman my mother and father
must have been in the high mountains of Laos, babies on their backs,
water pails balanced above trembling hips. I see my grandmother with
her shaman’s hood on, her flowery polyester shirt, facing the wall, lost
in a trance, busy on a journey of saving us from despair of the spirit, loss
of heart in the soul. I see my cousins and me playing kickball on cracked
pavement, our green and blue flip-flops flying with the motions of youth.
I see the walls of my aunts and uncles, my mother and father, myself:
framed photos of us standing stiff and strong before painted murals of
green. The world is resplendent in ill-represented perfection behind us,
painted lines streaked with confidence, the scenes we’ve left behind,
jungles we’ve never been to, American planes waiting, food spilling, men
and women scrambling for flights that would free them from death. Joel
Pickford has captured in the photos of this book the rich complexity of
a people contending with war, with weapons, with hope and humanity.
As a first-generation Hmong American daughter, I am drawn to one
photo of a grandma holding her grandson. The child wiggles as the
old woman tries to hold him safe. Behind them, there is a taped-up
fireplace. Beside them, an electric heater, unplugged. That grandma is
mine. Her grandson is me. Many years have passed since I wiggled in
my grandma’s arms, her aged arms holding me safe. Far away and long
ago, Grandma and I sat upon a manmade ledge, our backs to the hearth
xii
of a home lost in the jungles of Laos. Beside us, there was a piece of
American machinery, waiting to take us away. It is one photo of us in
time, a photo that captures all of us for all of time.
As a young writer looking to document the strength and wisdom
of our story, I cannot help but marvel at the photographer’s eye on my
people. He looks up at us. He looks directly at us. We cannot hide
from the songs of the qeej, singing its melodies of loss. The faces of the
dead man and the dead woman, the form of the dead child, all cold and
closed to the world, capture the human heart when it can no longer
beat for itself—when it must rely solely and exclusively on others to live
on. We hear the call to come and eat away the hunger at tables full of
white rice, delicately minced beef laab, the sweet of pumpkin soup, the
steaming broth of fatty pork and dark wilted greens swimming across
continents. Joel Pickford looks at the people, and in the photos they
look back at him, eyes full of shyness, full of strength, grief and laughter
glistening, hands and feet stilled and startling with exhaustion from the
long journey we have taken.
The story Joel Pickford tells in Soul Calling: A Photographic Journey
through the Hmong Diaspora is a story of how a people starved by war
search for food in a nation whose history has never included them. This
is a document of human experience across blue oceans and the expanse
of generations. This is a portrait of how our elders bear scars so that we
can carry armor in our hearts. The time for neglect and forgetting is
through; may the Hmong spirit find its way on the long journey home
to the places where our bodies are seen and our souls’ cries heard.
Kao Kalia Yang is the author of the award-winning The Latehomecomer: A
Hmong Family Memoir (Coffee House Press, 2008).
SOUL CALLING
xiv
JOEL PICKFORD
xv
SOUL CALLING
The New Arrivals, 2004–2006
xvi
Plate 24
Plate 23
Plate 25
Plate 26
Hmong Americans
Plate 35
Plate 36
LOST AND FOUND
I
arrive late to my first hu plig, awkwardly schlepping my bags of camera gear through the front door of
an aging tract home in Southeast Fresno. I step over dozens of shoes that clutter the narrow entryway, adding my own conspicuously large runners to the jumble. The ceremony is already underway;
two young women sit in the middle of the kitchen facing an altar covered in shiny gold paper and
adorned with candles, Chinese herbs, water buffalo horns, incense, a black dagger, and an assortment of
prescription medicine bottles. Behind them a dead pig lies belly-down on the floor, legs splayed out from
its sides. Hours before the ceremony, in the predawn darkness, the pig was slaughtered, dipped in boiling
water, and thoroughly scraped, leaving its naked skin the color of a newborn baby. A rope is tied loosely
around the two women and then the pig, connecting their souls. An older, barefoot woman wearing a
black hood slowly circles them, beating a gong and chanting in low, musical tones. Next, she picks up
a large iron saber with a heavy blade and drags it behind her, tracing the same circle on the linoleum
floor. Cradling a small bowl of water, rice, and a cooked egg in both hands, she positions herself behind
the pig. She shouts an incantation, takes a mouthful of water from the bowl, and sprays the two women.
After repeating this twice, she unties the women, who are now free to go.
The Hmong believe that if you become ill, experience bad luck, or suffer any kind of loss or hardship,
it is because your soul has either wandered away from your body or been kidnapped by the dab (“da”), spirits
that can be either good or bad depending on the circumstances. The purpose of a hu plig (“hoo plee”), or soul
calling ceremony, is to return the soul to its owner. This involves the sacrifice of at least one animal, whose
soul is bartered for the missing person’s soul in the spirit world. The Hmong believe that pigs, chickens, and
cows are always reincarnated as other pigs, chickens, and cows, so that their souls are merely borrowed for
the ceremony. Like many American families, who pay someone else to kill a turkey for their Thanksgiving
109
PLAIN OF JARS
T
he flight from Vientiane to Xieng Khouang Province takes less than an hour, but in that brief interval, the fourteen-year history of Laos’s Secret War unfolds outside the window of my plane. Almost
immediately after takeoff, the Chinese-built twin-prop craft begins a steep climb over a range of
jagged, dark green mountains creased with shadowed valleys. After about twenty minutes, the country’s
highest peak, Phou Bia (9,249 feet), looms on the horizon. From the right side of the plane I peer through
the clouds, trying to catch a glimpse of Long Cheng, the deep cleft valley near the foot of Phou Bia still
scarred with a landing strip the CIA built there in 1961. From this secret base, General Vang Pao commanded
U.S.-trained Hmong ground forces in a slow but inevitable military retreat ending in 1975, when the country
fell to North Vietnamese–supported Lao communists. Besides propping up the former royalist government,
the strategic goal of the CIA operation was to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines and communications
along the tangled network of mountain roads and paths known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Nearly every time I make this flight, my view of Long Cheng is obscured by clouds; only once
did I get a spectacularly clear, if fleeting, view of the Secret Valley. Similarly, my efforts to understand
what happened there four decades ago remain obscured by classified government documents and the
polemical nature of books written on the subject. Read several histories of the Secret War and you will
think you are reading about several different wars. Jane Hamilton-Merritt paints General Vang Pao as
a gifted and courageous tactician who fought against the odds to save his people from communism.
Alfred McCoy portrays him as a shrewd manipulator who used American air power to control the
Laotian opium trade and coerce his people into fighting for the CIA, despite the near certainty of defeat.
Roger Werner characterizes Vang Pao as an erratic and unpredictable commander, often working at
cross purposes with an equally conflicted succession of CIA operatives. By now, most historians agree
that the CIA used its private airline, Air America, to facilitate Laotian opium trafficking. The opium
113
SOUL CALLING
150
JOEL PICKFORD
151
Hmong Village Life in Laos
Plate 143
Plate 144
Plate 162
Plate 161
HARVEST
I
climb into the front seat of a weather-beaten minivan as my Laotian driver talks on his cell phone. By
now I have gotten used to the fact that the seat belts never work in the vehicles I rent here; without
fail either the buckle will be broken or one half of the belt will be missing entirely. This time, the
metal tongue on the right has been hacked off; most likely it was needed for an improvised motor repair
somewhere in the mountainous countryside of Xieng Khouang Province.
We drive to the end of the provincial capital’s modest main street and turn east on Route Seven,
a bumpy two-lane road that winds lazily out of town and continues all the way to Hanoi. During the
war, Route Seven was the sole conduit that carried Vietnamese troops and supplies to Lao communist
strongholds in the Plain of Jars. Consequently, fighting was very heavy along the road and today it is
lined with bomb craters. Villagers have found many ingenious uses for the craters, turning some into
ponds for raising fish or ducks, and filling others with fertile topsoil for vegetable gardens.
A few miles out of town, rolling hills give way to a wide river valley flanked by dramatic mountains
on either side. Lao, Khmu, and Hmong villages are scattered along the road, each recognizable by its
distinctive architecture and the look of its people. We pass a small group of Khmu women bathing next
to a roadside crater-pond. Wrapped in sarongs, they drench themselves with buckets of pond water, their
long dark hair and brown skin glistening in the morning sun. Farther along the road, thick-horned water
buffalo graze in quilted rice paddies, chewing on the stubble left after the harvest. In the distance, five
Buddhist monks walk single file through a golden field on their way back to a primitive country temple.
A shaft of sunlight sets their orange robes ablaze against the blue wall of mountain rising behind them.
Despite the devastation of two recent wars, Laos remains a profoundly beautiful country.
We drive along in silence for the first hour, taking it all in. My Hmong guide, Long Vang, rides
in the back seat, studying a map. Long is a postwar child of the Plain of Jars, struggling to put his
213
XYOO TSHIAB/NEW YEAR
T
wo women kneel on the asphalt selling medicinal herbs, their goblin-shaped roots and dried
mushrooms spread out on a pair of small ground cloths. Less than fifty yards away, a high-tech
vendor under a tent is selling the latest Hmong Hotties pinup calendar and showing “modeling”
videos of scantily-clad Hmong co-eds straddling Harley-Davidsons, primping for the camera or frolicking by the shore of a Midwestern lake. Thousands of Hmong in traditional New Year costumes stroll the
fairgrounds, filling the crisp December air with the exquisite sound of millions of jingling silver coins.
Meanwhile, loudspeakers blast Hmong pop music in several conflicting keys, punctuated by frequent
blaring announcements from the main stage. There, a new Miss Hmong will be crowned and General
Vang Pao will give the same speech he gave the year before about Hmong solidarity and the importance
of education.
Nowhere is the jarring fusion of Hmong and American cultures more in evidence than at Fresno’s
Hmong New Year Festival, the largest celebration in the Diaspora. Each day, approximately twenty
thousand Hmong from all over the world converge on the city’s sprawling fairgrounds, feasting on
barbecued pork, yellow saffron chicken, purple sticky rice, and green papaya salad. Vendors sell Hmong
movies, music, and books, traditional and modern clothing, shamanic accoutrements, musical instruments, karaoke systems, and more. Itinerant photographers shoot portraits in makeshift tent studios
painted with scenes of the CIA landing strip at Long Cheng. Small armies of amateur videographers
record anything and everything in seemingly endless takes; later the tapes will be dutifully labeled,
placed on living room shelves, and rarely, if ever, watched.
In most Hmong American households, the living room shelves are also lined with dozens of commercially produced Hmong-language movies, high melodramas shot on impossibly low budgets. Filmed
227
SOUL CALLING
chip. I photograph the faces of children whose shyness is beginning
to wear off; they all have runny noses, due to the freezing nighttime
temperatures. Some wear amulets around their necks, made from small
gourds, animal bones, or teeth, to appease the spirits that cause sickness.
Long and I are invited into a house for lunch. A large family sits
huddled around the fire, which, at this time of year, is kept perpetually
lit. A black cooking pot and the rubber flip-flops everyone wears are the
only signs of modernity. The menu consists of sticky rice and boiled
greens. Predictably, Long complains about the lack of meat. I suggest
that he add a bit of homemade pepper sauce to his greens; it is some of
the best I have tasted. Unlike the Lao and Thai, who spice their food
when they cook it, the Hmong prefer to serve their food unseasoned
or lightly seasoned, with pepper sauce on the side. Homemade pepper
sauce, with its endlessly delicious variations from family to family, is one
of the highlights of every Hmong meal for me.
Very little conversation accompanies our lunch, as Long is having a
difficult time understanding the village’s dialect. After we finish eating, I
move closer to the fire and reflect on my five-year journey in the Hmong
Diaspora. Without a doubt, New Year in Xam Neua, and this village in
particular, have been among the highlights. Yet as I look around the
one-room dwelling, I feel hopelessly separated from its inhabitants by
an insurmountable gulf of language and cultural disparity. I would need
to live here for a year to really figure out what life in this village is all
about. However, in less than an hour I will walk over the hill and drive
back to civilization in my rented truck. What will I carry away, besides
millions of ones and zeros stored on a memory chip?
My thoughts drift to my Hmong American friends at home. What
do I really understand about them? I have shared their meals, ceremonies, funerals, weddings, even camping and hunting trips to the Sierra
Nevada. I have listened to their stories and taken countless photographs.
238
I have had my own hu plig ceremony and been given a Hmong name.
Yet, at some deep level, my Hmong friends remain a mystery to me.
Suddenly I realize what it is that separates us: they are much more
American than I am. With their strong commitment to marriage, family,
fiscal discipline, and the practical matters of home life, the Hmong are
one of the fastest assimilating immigrant groups ever thrown into the
American melting pot. Meanwhile, here I sit, eight thousand miles from
home, unmarried, without children, committed only to a life of arts, letters, and inquiry, living on unreliable income from grants, exhibitions,
and book royalties. As my Hmong friends in California busily save for
their children’s college educations, I sit on a packed-earth floor in the
mountains of Laos and seriously consider spending the next year of my
life in this remote village.
When it comes time to leave, Long and I thank our hosts more
with gestures than words. A crowd gathers for one more look at the
unforgettable stranger who walked into their village on the second
day of New Year, 2006. As I lift my camera to take a souvenir picture,
I am seized with an epiphany: I see a crowd of Americans gathered
around one of my photographs in a museum, gawking, pointing, and
laughing, just as these villagers do now. I have a vision of photography
as an imperfect two-way mirror, through which people from different
cultures attempt to look at one another but, to a large extent, see only
themselves. I wonder whether most Americans, without the benefit of
an eight-thousand-mile trek to Xam Neua, five years of interviewing
Hmong refugees, and five years of reading Hmong history and ethnography, can possibly grasp what they are seeing in a frozen frame
of time. More important, I wonder if all of those prerequisites plus
a camera make me any more qualified to tell this story than anyone
else. In the end, viewers will have to ponder these questions for themselves, with only my mute color prints to guide them.
YER LOR LEE:
A HMONG SHAMAN
TELLS HER STORY
Seated in her living room, surrounded by dozens of framed photos of her
family, ancestors, and historic Hmong leaders, Yer Lor Lee revisits the
first thirty-three years of her life, leading up to her arrival in America.
Now, sixty-one, she is an animated storyteller, gesturing with her arms
and occasionally leaping from her chair to act out a particularly dramatic scene. Dressed in black capris and a colorful print top, she wears
her hair stylishly short and goes barefoot nearly every day of the year. Her eyes shine with contagious enthusiasm and she
laughs frequently, despite the harrowing nature of much of her story. Sometimes, however, she breaks into tears as the terrors she
survived come vividly to life in her memory. She often punctuates her narrative with the rising falsetto tones that both Hmong
and Lao speakers use to emphasize the extraordinary height, weight, precariousness, or danger of a subject they are describing.
When she talks about the war, she produces amazing sound effects. Her vocal imitations of bombs are the best I have ever heard;
she is a virtual audio catalog of falling ordinance, skillfully rendering both the trajectory and impact of each type of bomb.
T
he first thing I can remember is going hunting with my older brother, Za Teng. I was about
three or four years old. He gave me a little basket to wear on my back; every time he shot a
bird or a squirrel, he would put it in my basket. Za Teng was my favorite brother and I loved
him very much. He was like a father to me because my own father had died when I was about a year
old. Later, when the war came to Xieng Khouang, Za Teng was one of the first young men from our
village to go fight and die.
239
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joel Pickford is an award-winning photographer, filmmaker, and author
born and raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley. His photographs have
graced the pages of Black & White magazine and are found in many public
and private collections, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New
Orleans, LA), the Fresno Art Museum, the University of Oregon Museum
of Art, and the Weston Gallery (Carmel, CA). His documentary films have
been seen on PBS stations throughout the country. Joel is the coauthor
and art director of California Light (The Press at California State University,
Fresno, 1998), the first art book ever to combine digital reproduction
with hexachrome printing. Joel’s decade-long project, Le Monde Creole:
Photographs of Southern Louisiana, culminated in an exhibition that premiered
at the Fresno Art Museum in 2007 and traveled to the Centro Fotografico
Manual Alvarez Bravo in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2008. In 2005, Joel received
two major grants from the California Council for the Humanities and
the James Irvine Foundation to document the Hmong refugee culture of
central California and northern Laos. The resulting project, Soul Calling,
also served as Joel’s thesis for an interdisciplinary master’s degree in documentary studies and Southeast Asian studies (California State University,
Fresno, 2009). His scholarly research also includes ethnographic field
work on the Laotian language and culture.
Author photo by Meng Vue.
264